New to the IMS in 2011 is the utilization of a double-blind review process.

A double-blind review process creates 'anonymity' for both authors and reviewers. As newly implemented for IMS in 2011, the reviewers will not be apprised of the authors' names or institutions in the submitted manuscript; such information must be deleted from the manuscript by the authors before submission. The double-blind review process is increasingly being adopted in IEEE conferences, and the process an author follows to conceal the origin of the manuscript from the reviewers is well documented in the literature. While double-blind reviewing may not be a perfect system, at its worst it simply becomes a traditional single-blind system.

A double-blind review process greatly assists in the elimination of any perception of bias for or against an author or institution based on "name" recognition, country, gender, etc. This helps assure authors that:

• IMS2011 judges submitted papers equally.
• IMS2011 judges the submitted paper and not the author(s) and/or their affiliation(s).

Extensive resources are available from other conference and journal websites as to how to write a submitted paper suitable for double-blind reviewing. Besides the obvious need to remove names and affiliations under the title, there are many other steps that need to be taken. For example, as referencing of prior work is required to evaluate a submission, citation of such prior work is still required. However, the text of the submitted manuscript must not use the terms "my" or "our" in referring to prior work but should reference the work in the third person (e.g. "..it has been shown that [ref]..."). The author must take every step possible to make the submission anonymous and avoid identification by inference. To make the process as simple as possible we can reduce the procedure to just a few steps:

1. eliminate names, contact information, and affiliations from title pages (and anyplace else)
2. eliminate references to funding sources
3. eliminate acknowledgments
4. scan the text and make sure to use the third person to refer to personal work
5. make sure figures do not contain any affiliation related identifier
6. de-personalize the work by using anonymous text where necessary
7. remove excessive self-citations and citations to unpublished work

Please note that if the paper is accepted, the final archived version of the paper will need to be modified to reinstate the information removed in steps 1 through 6 (excessive self citations should never have been there in the first place).

Papers submitted to IMS2011 that disregard these requirements will not be reviewed.